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Recordings

'This would have been a massive project for even the biggest international label, but from a small independent … it is a miracle. An ideal Christ ...'Please give me the complete Hyperion Schubert songs set – all 40 discs –and, in the next life, I promise I'll "re-gift" it to Schubert himself … ...» More

'Word painting and nuances are stunning and the singing mischievously delicious. The personality of the singer simply leaps from the disc' (CDReview)'Yet another splendid instalment … She sings these varied poems with rapt intensity, beauty of tone and deep insight into the predicament of Scot ...» More

'Ainsley interprets his songs with the tonal beauty, fine-grained phrasing and care for words that are the hallmarks of his appreciable art … all ...'A glorious conclusion to this magisterial edition … a magnificent project … one of the great achievements of recording history' (BBC Music ...» More

Mother recently scolded me, and warned me sternly against love. ‘Every woman’, she said, ‘has paid its price; she who is ensnared by love is lost.’ And so I think it better if neither of us speaks of it again. I am in truth still yours for ever. But love you, Hans – this I cannot do!

Whenever we have a holiday, it will be my greatest joy if your hands twine the gifts of springtime to adorn my bodice. When the dancing begins, then – as is only fair – it will be your duty to dance with Gretchen; I shall even be jealous. But love you, Hans – this I cannot do!

And when cool evening descends and we rest, filled with tender emotion, keep your hand on my bodice, and feel how my heart beats! And if you wish to teach me with kisses what your eyes silently tell me, even that I shall not deny you. But love you, Hans – this I cannot do!

A change of mood from utter purity to teasing ribaldry. 'The Distinction' of the title is the difference between love and love, nudge nudge, wink wink, you know, the real thing. Reed avers that this song resembles Lieschen's aria in Die Zwillingsbrüder (1820), as indeed it does in terms of its key and certain other characteristics; the difference is that Lieschen's is a tender song of sexual awakening, a plea for independence from her father (and such it is meant to be taken seriously) whereas this song feigns propriety merely to inflame passion. One is reminded of Victorian music hall songs where the punters were delighted by the interplay of mock innocence and concealed experience. That Schubert was prepared to publish songs of this type was simply a career move, the equivalent of the efforts of great classical singers of today to beat the pop world at its own game. Significantly, he entered into this field only after it had been established beyond all doubt that he was a serious composer of challenging and innovative music; a younger man might have run the risk of being typecast as lightweight, something of which Schubert, bless him, could never have been accused in any respect. Broad comedy was never his strongest suit, and he was simply not sufficiently interested in setting poetry which played to the masses. This having been said, the two songs on this disc (in a more popular vein than the other two Refrain Lieder) are highly effective when the right singer has a glint in the eye. The poet Seidl, seven years Schubert's junior, to whom the songs are dedicated, was something of a go-getter. Only in his early twenties, but already well known, the newly appointed editor of the almanac Aurora and ambitious for success in all spheres, he might have played a part in persuading the composer to write and publish the songs. It is significant however that Schubert wrote him a letter in August 1828 (not in the English edition of the documents) addressed ironically to 'Herr Gabriel' and returning poems which he found unsuitable for setting. So much for the theory that Schubert would set anything by his friends.

The music is earthy and illustrative and the vocal line has a teasing bounce and flounce to it. The piano part is a clever depiction of the scolding mother, her jabbing remonstrative finger playing repeated notes in the strident heights of the treble. In the gesturing of this piano music, with crushed notes for emphasis, there is a prophetic hint of the crabby lecturing of Hugo Wolf's Rat einer Alten. For the fifth line of each verse the song moves to the key of B flat, which suggests an abrupt change of subject and a quick readjustment of dress. Indeed, Hans is never far away, his marauding hands are written into the very bodice of the song. The girl's first 'doch lieben Hans, lieben kann ich dich nicht' seems to lure the boy towards her in a fine example of Biedermeier doublespeak given piquant musical life by Schubert's interrupted cadence, but the repeat of the words pushes him away, not before having toyed with the word 'Liebe' as a promise of things to come. As in Wolf's Auf dem grünen Balkon, the eyes (and the voice) say 'Yes', the fingers (and the accompaniment) say 'No.' It was ever thus in courtship; but here we somehow know that she would be able to love him if the price were right.

As the poems did not appear in the three-volume edition of Seidl’s poems that appeared between 1826 and 1828, the texts must have been given to the composer in autograph. This could have happened at any time (and stylistically one is tempted to assign a date before 1828), but the presence of a sketch for Die Unterscheidung on the same autograph as the last movement of the C minor Sonata D958 (discovered by Christa Landon in 1970) suggests the songs (if initially conceived as a group) were written in haste in the summer of Schubert’s last year, and rushed to publication by Thaddäus Weigl in the hope of commercial success. (Otto Erich Deutsch was unaware of this shared autograph sketch when he suggested, in the first edition of his Thematic Catalogue, that the Refrainlieder songs were written in 1826.) The publisher’s announcement appeared in the Wiener Zeitung of 13 August and read as follows: ‘The public has long cherished the wish to have, for once, a composition of a merry comic nature from the pen of this song composer of genius. This wish has been gratified in a surprising manner by Herr Schubert in the present four songs, which in part are truly comic and in part bear in them the character of ingenuousness and humour.’

In this form of words one can discern the publisher’s irate disappointment that he was unable to announce the set of Komische Lieder (‘Comic Songs’) which he had hoped Schubert would deliver. The composer’s ‘surprising manner’ was obviously most of all a surprise to Weigl. Only Die Unterscheidung and Die Männer sind méchant could possibly be thought to fall into a comic category, and even then they display a musical refinement which is hardly typical of the humorous ditties beloved of the populace. The piano writing in particular makes little concession to the amateur. The two remaining songs in the set are hardly funny: Bei dir allein! is a straightforward love song (admittedly rather Italiante in manner, and thus associated, in Schubert’s mind at least, with a touch of affectionate parody) and Irdisches Glück depicts the Viennese homespun philosopher who has featured in a number of Schubert’s lighter – though not necessarily comic – songs. It is highly likely that Weigl had to scratch his head for some time to come up with the (hardly inspiring) title Refrainlieder which is a compromise description uniting all four Seidl songs. It must have seemed much less commercially viable to him than if he had been able to announce a complete set of truly funny pieces. Not for the first time Schubert had revealed his innate inability to travel truly down-market; and, as far as we know, the pieces, despite a good review, had no great success with the public. Schubert also made little concession to the amateur market in terms of technical difficulty. Bei dir allein! is a tricky piece, very low in parts for a tenor and too high for most high baritones. The piano writing is also tricky, requiring a nimble left hand able to snatch at the right basses and an untiring right hand able to negotiate many different changes of chord at quite a quick pace. The one concession to popular taste here is a type of gushing operatic style where a singer can impress with his ardour and bravado. An unusual feature of the vocal line is the number of decorative mordents on the word ‘dir’ which add a hint of an Italianate sob to the protestations of love. Apart from the fact that the language is German, one could very easily see this as a tenor variant of the style of the Italian songs written for Luigi Lablache in 1827. It is always possible of course that the four Refrainlieder were not all written at the same time – perhaps this song was composed earlier than Die Unterscheidung (after all, it is only this which shares the autograph of the C minor Piano Sonata).

There is one further clue, however, which makes it seem possible to date Bei dir allein! with greater certainty. The incessant triplet movement (a bass note or chord for the left hand followed by a falling figure of two quavers in the right, the first of which is usually a chord) is an accompaniment found in certain earlier songs (the restless Schulze setting Im Walde comes to mind) but the similarity to Frühlingssehnsucht from Schwanengesang is even more remarkable. In this work (also a ‘Refrainlied’ in its way) we find the same breathless 2/4 time signature and a similar ardour and almost reckless intensity. The two pieces can both boast an extended introduction of unceasing triplets (9 bars for the Seidl and 12 for the Rellstab – playing these is like being on a roller-coaster) with a similar ingenious manipulation of the chords’ inner voices where fast-moving harmonies build up to the entry of the singer. Both songs are harmonically adventurous and allow the tenor to end with an impassioned vocal flourish followed by a diminuendo and hushed chords for the piano (compare the last three bars of each piece – both passages are marked ‘piano’, and with identical spacing of crotchet chords, rests, and concluding minims with fermata). From this it might be possible to suggest that both songs were written at a similar time. There is a preliminary sketch for Frühlingssehnsucht and this proposes a very different song (in terms of key and prosody) than the one which was eventually composed. Bei dir allein! with its priapic energy – it is after all very much a spring song as the second strophe informs us – may be the missing link between the discarded ideas embodied in that sketch and Frühlingssehnsucht as we know it.

The original key is A flat major. The fire of youthful vigour to which the poet refers occasions a fervent vocal line which leaps as much as a tenth on the word ‘Liebe’ and unshamedly indulges in all sorts of fancy modulations – tonal pirouettes of which Schubert was master. For the final two lines of the first strophe we find ourselves, via an astonishing shift sideways, in the key of G flat. After six bars the singer breaks out of this thicket of flats with an extended ‘allein’ on D natural (the note is held for five beats as if to promise an eternity of devotion) and then, just as suddenly, we find ourselves back in A flat for a repeat of the words where ‘mich freut’ is set to a high A flat. The middle section (the poem’s second strophe) then moves into E major (the complex enharmonic change from F flat major to the four sharps of the new key signature hardly seems designed to appeal to the accompanists of ditty-singing amateurs). This verse is altogether more gentle with deliciously melismatic settings of ‘die Luft so labend’ and ‘so balsamreich der Abend’ where the quavers of the vocal line are made to waft as if they were being coaxed up the stave by the caressing winds. The words ‘So kühl der Hain’ are echoed by delightful little piano interludes in descending octaves which swoon as if the singer were almost about to faint in rapture. One feels that Schubert is smiling at this slightly overheated mood. Perhaps that is why he regarded Bei dir allein! as a lighter song – without going so far as to make fun of it.

The shift back to the home key (via a modulation which puns on the fact that G sharp in E major is really A flat) reminds us that this has been advertised as a ‘Refrainlied’. At this point one feels that the composer is reining-in a natural tendency to make the music more ornate and complicated – certainly better tailored to the third verse. However, this new strophe is set to music which is almost identical with the opening music, even if Schubert makes a few minor adjustments in the word-setting. The final mini-cadenza on the word ‘dir’ is a new, and an operatic touch typical of this song’s expressive extravagance. Richard Capell waxes lyrical about Bei dir allein! and Reed refers to it as ‘irresistible’. To me it has always seemed to offer more on paper than it delivers: it is awkwardly written for the voice and not quite large and showy enough to be a proper blockbuster. The composer might have felt he could improve on it. It is also for this reason that a link with Frühlingssehnsucht seems a possibility.

You told me, mother: he’s a young rogue! I would not believe you until I had tormented myself sick. Yes, I now know he really is; I had simply misjudged him. You told me, mother: ‘Men are naughty!’

Yesterday, as dusk fell silently, in the copse outside the village, I heard a whispered ‘Good evening!’ and then a whispered ‘Many thanks!’ I crept up and listened; I stood as if transfixed: it was he, with someone else – ‘Men are naughty!’

O mother, what torture! I must be out with it, I must! It didn’t just stop at whispering, it didn’t just stop at greetings! It went from greetings to kisses, from kisses to holding hands, from holding hands … ah, dear mother, ‘Men are naughty!’

Seidl understood what would appeal to the public at the same time as being sufficiently ambiguous to pass the censor. This poor girl has been duped and betrayed by naughty men; what can men now do to comfort her? The presence of a mother adds a prurient edge to the subtext—'if she is still relying on her mother's advice and guidance, how young can she really be?' There could be no greater contrast to the maternal role of the Virgin Mary. Nothing is what it seems, even the title actually means something exactly opposite to what it says—men are bastards, but they're really 'absolutely loverly'. There is no greater composer than Schubert for the expression of real innocence, but the girl's hurt at her betrayal and her wide-eyed shock at the facts of life sound phoney to me, although I have sometimes heard singers attempt to bring a sincere sense of desolation to the story. The tempo, a slowly swinging two beats in a bar, has to vary with the verses, and has to be slow enough for the words to register; at certain moments the story is spun out to titilate the voyeur, but at others the pulses race. The middle of the song (lines five and six of each verse, before the refrain) consists of three sequences of mounting intensity, shifting from A minor to A major (a surprisingly ecstatic affirmation of the tonic major considering that the girl is supposedly upset and that men are being berated), and enhanced by a furtive exploration of the mediant. The snatched beats' rest between these stages of activity (particularly effective in the third verse) suggest the panting of the pantless. The crossing of hands, unusual in Schubert's accompaniments, and a famous nineteenth-century means of enabling male and female piano duettists to improve their acquaintance, seems in itself suggestive of hanky panky. The final two chords, marked suddenly piano after a forte postlude, have the effect of a knowing wink at the audience.

So many people look with grim faces and resentment on the wide world; life’s wondrous stage lies open to them, though in vain. But I know better what to do, and, far from being ashamed of joy, I gladly delight in the moment: that, for sure, is happiness.

No laurels have adorned my locks; no halo of glory has shone about my head. Yet my life is not in vain; quiet thanks are also a halo! He who, far from bold flights, is content with peaceful pleasures of the valley, need never fear for his neck: and that, for sure, is happiness.

When one day a messenger from the world beyond calls me, as he does all, with grave, hollow voice, then, in parting, I shall gladly bid this lovely world farewell. Maybe, after all, the hands of true friends will at the end press my hand, and friendly eyes will bless me: and that, brothers, is surely happiness!

Of the four Seidl Refrainlieder this is the most rough-hewn and simple. Even the look of the music on the printed page approximates the Viennese popular songs of the period with galumphing octave leaps of no great elegance in the accompaniment, exacerbated by slightly crass accents on some of the off-beats in the piano writing, and lumbering Alberti basses. This is all done deliberately in the interests of heartiness, and Schubert must have worked quite hard to divest himself of the natural elegance of his piano writing. This song is as near as the composer ever came to parodying the type of Singspiel ditty for the working people which made mediocre composers a lot of money. Irdisches Glück may not have been as funny as the publisher Weigl might have wished, but the musical tone (and the simplicity of the vocal line) is reminiscent of such contemporary ‘masters’ of the comic style as Wenzl Müller, Franz Glaeser and Josef Drechsler. To our ears their harmonic vocabulary sounds impoverished and lacking in imagination, and it is hard for us to imagine why people should have so delighted in such work. The vocal line is largely doubled by the piano which drives home the philosophical points that the singer is making; it is as if they are being banged into us. (Memories of Schubert the schoolmaster and unwilling disciplinarian here!) There is an element of lecturing and finger-wagging as there usually is in Schubert’s songs where self-appointed sages dispense their wit and wisdom. These figures derive from the stock clowns of Viennese farce (not unlike the more humble characters in Shakespeare’s plays) who waste no time in reassuring the public that it is they – not the toffs or intellectuals – who have a commonsense attitude to life. As Capell puts it, the message here is ‘take life as it comes and don’t cry for the moon’.

The D minor tonality of the original key puts us in mind of Wie Ulfru fischt – the Mayrhofer setting which has a similar working-class earthiness, if a song with a fishing theme may be described as earthy. Ulfru is more delightful as a piece of music however; in Irdisches Glück Schubert seems to depict, rather too well, the limited imagination of the ever-so-humble protagonist. The tempo is a relatively brisk ‘Ziemlich geschwind’, but the foursquare rhythm ensures that the music is a march not against the philistines but with them. This applies at least to the minor-key section which takes up the first half of each strophe. But Seidl’s verses are divided in two for musical purposes: the fifth to the eighth lines constitute a major-key section which enumerates the narrator’s various reasons for happiness (the refrain at the end of each verse is ‘dass ist denn doch gewiss ein Glück’) and this music is much more typically Schubertian. This change of key is introduced by a cadence on ‘vergebens aufgetan’ (line four of the first verse) after which the piano echoes this rather woeful complaint with a three-bar interlude of some charm but no great originality. With the change to D major the music becomes more playful. At first, true to form, the piano doggedly shadows the voice, but when the tune of ‘Da weiss ich besser mich zu nehmen’ reverts to the piano (played an octave higher as if it were a flute solo) the passage beginning ‘Und fern, der Freude mich zu schämen’ is treated as an obbligato where the words are spoken interjections to this lilting little melody. The influence here is Mozart in Singspiel mood rather than any of the Viennese tunesmiths. There is a hearty seven-bar postlude to each verse (that march again!) which finishes each verse in mock defiance.

A little of this music goes a very long way, something which is true of much music that has been conceived as an up-to-the-minute reflection of popular taste: it very quickly passes its sell-by date however worthy, or even amusing, it appeared at the time. If this is a song for the Biedermeier age, one is reminded that ‘Biedermeier’ derives from the German adjective ‘bieder’ which means unsophisticated and stolid. In most cases music of this kind is produced by people who match its limitations, but this was music written on commission, as it were, and is hardly to be judged as ‘real’ Schubert. Perhaps he took some pleasure in writing something that gloried in its own mediocrity (he was apparently given to chortling in a rather snide way on occasion). One would prefer to think of him having fun at his fellow composers’ expense in this way rather than being made to write music of this kind purely for financial reasons. Of the four Refrainlieder the one heard most frequently in the concert hall is Die Männer sind méchant. That at least has the advantage of a mildly suggestive text.

There are four verses in this absolutely strophic song (which John Reed rightly pronounces ‘a little dull and monotonous’), three of which appear in this recital. Singers of the day would have expected to vary the tempo and mood of each strophe according to the words. It is interesting to speculate what Schubert might have felt in reading the verse describing the lack of laurels celebrating the singer’s fame. There is a possibility that Seidl wrote these lines thinking of Schubert, and it is possible that the composer lobbed the inference back in the poet’s direction by dedicating these songs to Seidl. But the main irony is in the last verse: the call of the messenger ‘from the world beyond’ would come far more quickly than Schubert could ever have dreamed.